Execution as an act of mercy is a difficult theme, and at the premiere on5 July it was rewarded with enthusiastic applause.Here you'll find further performance dates: www.bad-hersfelder-festspiele.de/spielplan/der-prozess.htmlExtract from a review in the Hersfelder Zeitung:A cold wind whistles through the walls of the abbey ruins, snowflakes fall, and Justitia here is not blind but entirely veiled, so that the inscription "in dubio pro reo" reads like sheer mockery.Even if the icy atmosphere is artificially created, it works in Joern Hinkel's staging of Franz Kafka's novel "Der Prozess", which the artistic director has tailored, in his own performance version, to today's times and conditions.An arrest without any reasons given, the maze through the institutions and into a bizarre judicial apparatus whose opaque mechanisms seem to serve nothing but themselves - all of this is contained in the ordeal of the bank clerk Josef K., who constantly questions what is happening to him but never receives an answer. At the end stands a death sentence which, unlike in the book, is not carried out at once but leaves the path to appeal open. After the martyrdom of Josef K., one wonders whether immediate execution might not have been the more merciful solution.That you cannot simply return to business as usual is something the premiere audience felt too: they gave long and ample applause for an intense evening of theatre. Yet the tension is slow to release, and the heaviness lingers.Director: Joern Hinkel
Der Prozess
